‘See dogs eating bodies in the rubble’

5 August 2006

Why did the pilot target this particular house? I don’t know. What can be said is that the overall level of civilian casualties indicates that the air campaign is being fought with nothing like the precision and carefulness that Israel has claimed. Certainly the civilians I have spoken to who have been attacked in their vehicle convoys — and there have been many — would find it impossible to accept such an assertion.

I have been reporting what I have seen and heard on the Lebanese part of the battlefield. The suffering of Israeli families and the terrible fear of living with the threat from Hezbollah has been carefully documented by my BBC colleagues south of the border. Hezbollah rains rockets down without any care for precision. They may hit a field or kill a child. It is only through the inaccuracy of their Katyusha rockets and the limited power of Hezbollah’s arsenal that Israel’s civilian death toll has been so much lower than that of the Lebanese. Be under no illusion, Hezbollah would be wilfully killing far more civilians if it could.

Qana has not ended the war. Not yet, at any rate. It has merely increased pressure on Israel to expedite its campaign. Hence the accelerated ground operation. But it has also helped give Hezbollah one of the prizes it sought when it launched this war: a Lebanese people united in fierce opposition to Israel. Travelling through border villages last week, I saw the devastation wreaked on the civilian population and found Christians as well as Shia Muslims who raged against Israel.

‘We are good people. What have we done to them?’ one Maronite woman asked as we both cowered under Israeli shelling in the largely Christian village of Rmeich. A few minutes earlier I had descended into the basement of the church of St George to find several hundred terrified and hungry refugees. Many Christians do not like or trust Hezbollah but they are furious at being driven from their homes and at the huge cost in civilian lives. When you are being shelled in your village and then again as you try to flee, you are not inclined to go back along the chain of responsibility and blame Sheikh Nasrallah for ordering the original attack.